Tag Archives: glass bottles

Winebits 782: Restaurant wine prices, consumer sentiment, glass recycling

restaurant wine list
“Yes, the wine costs more than the rest of your dinner. It’s restaurant wine, isn’t it?”

This week’s wine news: Why restaurant wine is so expensive, plus consumers want lower prices and Spanish producer aims at recycling

• More sad news: How does $17 a glass for restaurant wine sound? No, I’m not making it up. Rather, Esther Mobley reports in the San Francisco Chronicle, that’s the normal price of a glass of wine at Bay Area restaurants. She lists the increases at several of the region’s “affordable” wine list spots, and some are even more than $17. The reasons are familiar (inflation, high business costs), but the results show once again that wine in restaurants is increasingly reserved for aging Baby Boomers, tech moguls, and the rest of the one percent. That’s hardly good news for wine, is it?

• Lower prices: Kroger says “saving money is top of mind for shoppers.” There are some caveats to the results of this survey; it was conducted by a Kroger subsidiary, for one thing. But tits finding are still worth nothing: 56 percent said saving money is their top financial resolution for 2023, while almost tow-thirds are scaling back on non-essentials and just short of one-half are purchasing fewer items. This is more bad news for wine, which is not an essential and which can be given up to save money by people want to save money.

• Bottle recycling: Spanish producer Familia Torres is trying to set up a European system for reusing wine bottles. Torres has long emphasized green policies, and it even has an executive with the title “director of climate change.” The story says the company wants to establish bottle standards to work across the European Union – size and glass ingredients, for example, so that a German bottle could be recycled in France, a Spanish bottle could be recycled in Italy, and so forth. Are you listening to this, Big Wine?

Winebits 781: The Happy New Year 2023 edition

glass wine bottle and cork
Is the glass bottle dripping its last?

This week’s wine news: The ultimate take on glass bottles, plus more wine and Brexit woes and a new cold-hardy wine grape

• Take that, glass bottles! Paul Tincknell, the blog’s official wine marketer, offers the final nails to the glass bottle’s coffin, complete with charts and graphs: “Glass loses out on almost every metric of climate change.” Paul and I have discussed this many times; this piece encapsulates everything we’ve talked about and then some. Yes, the piece is long and gets a bit technical, but the next time someone throws “romance of the bottle” at you, you’ll know enough from reading this to tell them to stop being so quaint. A 40-pound case of wine isn’t very romantic.

• Call it Brexit-tier: The Wine Curmudgeon, who would not wish the three-tier system on anyone, can only sigh when he reads of the continuing Brexit-induced woes for Britain’s wine business. The latest (via drinksbusiness.com), from a leading importer: “I have experienced first-hand just how terrible things have become post-Brexit. … Just from a bureaucracy point of view, the paperwork … I’ve imported and exported wine for 30 years for leading wine companies. We just see delays, we see paperwork problems, everything has become so much more complicated. … It really is a joke.” Where have we heard that description before?

• Cold hardy: Call it clarion, the newest cold-hardy grape from the viticulturists at the University of Minnesota. Its parentage includes seyval blanc, pinot noir and the cold-hardy frontenac, producing a dry white wine with “fruity attributes of citrus, pear, melon, apricot and chamomile. Some evaluators describe the wine as being similar to southern hemisphere sauvignon blanc.” Plus, it’s resistant to the dreaded downy mildew, a serious problem in the Eastern U.S. due to humid and rainy summers.

Winebits 759: Local Wine Events, glass bottles, smoke taint

Woman reading a computer tablet
“Let me see — where is the Local Wine Events site for my city?”

This week’s wine news: Local Wine Events celebrates its 22nd birthday, plus glass bottle recycling and progress on smoke taint

• Happy birthday: In 2000, Eric Orange was looking for wine events in Denver. Twenty-two years later this month, Local Wine Events has some 300,000 subscribers and posts wine, beer, and spirits events in 63 countries. Which, frankly, may be one of the best things to happen to wine this century. Eric is a long-time pal of the blog and offered some much appreciated support during our Drink Local Wine days. That her has made it this long speaks to the service he provides – and that the site has been to leverage the Internet to make money.

• Glass recycling: Refresh Glass wants to recycle 10 million glass wine bottles – and it’s apparently off to a good start. The company, founded by Ray DelMuro, has turned more than 1.6 million bottles into drinking glasses, carafes, planters, votive holders, and more. DelMuro says glass recyclers must find a way to increase the amount that is used again – only about one-third of glass bottles are recycled – and so works with with local restaurants to collect their empty bottles. Says DelMuro: “People are sick and tired of being greenwashed into thinking something’s been recycled when it’s not.”

• Smoke taint research: Oregon State researchers may have found the compounds that contribute to smoke taint in wine and grapes. Previously, compounds known as volatile phenols seemed to indicate smoke taint. But some wines with high levels often didn’t taste of smoke taint while wines with low levels did. So Elizabeth Tomasino, an associate professor of enology, and her colleagues looked for other compounds, and may have found one in a new class of sulfur-containing compounds called thiophenols. It seemed to cause smoke taint when combined with volatile phenols. This, of course, is a major discovery if it’s true given the rash of wildfires and the possibility of smoke taint in the last couple of years on the west coast.

Winebits 745: Baseball, aluminum bottles, green wine

Big Beer
Pondering the future of wine and baseball requires intense concentation.

This week’s wine news: Baseball and wine face the same problems, plus aluminum bottles as the new glass and deciphering green wine

• Misery loves company: The Wine Curmudgeon has written extensively about baseball on the blog, no doubt trying many reader’s patience. But here comes Zach Geballe on VinePair — lamenting many of the same laments. Each, he says, “are struggling mightily to connect to a younger generation of potential consumers,” thanks to too many choices, a sense of elitism, and an obsession with the past. I would add a fourth: That the wine business, like baseball, can’t see the forest for the trees. Making money is not enough if, by the time you’ve made your money, you’ve ruined baseball or wine and there’s no one left who cares about either. Right, Ricketts family?

• Aluminum bottles: The WC has spent even more time trying to convince the wine business to abandon glass bottles than he has worrying about baseball; now, Melissa Campana on Mashed says it’s time for aluminum bottles. She mostly rewrites a better-reported Food & Wine piece, but I’ll take anything I can get, given glass’ stranglehold on wine. I just hope her email isn’t as nasty as mine was the last time I wrote a glass bottle piece.

• Green wine: Organic and sustainable wine has never made much of an impact on the market, mostly because the topic is so confusing. For example, wine made with organic grapes is different than organic wine. Now, apparently, producers are starting to figure this out. Beverage Daily reports that a worldwide survey found that “wine professionals” want to see a simpler, more clear definition that consumers can rely on. The study seemed to find a growing recognition of the importance of green wine, but many still remain unsure how to define it.

Winebits 705: Drink Local, glass bottles, ancient wine

ancient wine
The Greek god Apollo apparently enjoyed a cup or two wine when he wasn’t spreading plague.

This week’s wine news: Is regional wine coming to the wine business’ rescue? Plus, one more analysis dissects glass bottles and wine may be even more ancient than we thought

• Regional wine to the rescue? The mainstream media has again discovered Drink Local, offering it as a way to enjoy wine without crowds and high prices as the pandemic ends. Plus, writes Erica Lamberg in USA Today, “Just keep in mind your wine-tasting and winery visits may be different that you’re used to. But that can be a good thing.” Which, of course, is what those of us who support regional wine have been saying for years. Lamberg suggests Colorado, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, as well as Oregon – though it’s hardly off the beaten path. The first three are first-rate suggestions, and it’s especially nice to see Pennsylvania – not among Drink Local’s best-known states – on the list.

• No more glass? Emilie Steckenborn, writing in the British trade magazine Harpers, doesn’t mince words: “The sustainability wave is sweeping across the world, and there’s hardly an industry that could see a more radical transformation than food and beverages. While consumers are happy to see changes in food packaging, the wine sector – with 19 billion glass bottles sold into the global market annually – is a slow mover.” Which, of course, is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. Still, that the article appears where it does, and that it speaks so forcefully, is a sign that more and more people who are part of wine see the need for change.

• How old was it? Wine drinking in Europe may date to 4300 BC in prehistoric Greece – much earlier than previously thought. Archaeologists working in northern Greece have found thousands of ancient grape seeds and pomace – residue from pressed grapes – in the remains of a burned house near Philippi. That may be a couple of thousand years earlier than first suspected. As such, it’s the earliest evidence of wine drinking in Europe, and researchers expect the work to shed more light on the daily activities of ancient Greeks. So far, there is no evidence that the three-tier system existed in ancient Greece, but that’s probably just an oversight.

Photo: “Greece-0895 – Wide-bowled Drinking Cup” by archer10 (Dennis) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0